The present invention relates to a correction processing method for a satellite image including geometric distortion, and in particular to a correction processing method for an image, for example, an image fed from a sensor thematic mapper (hereafter referred to as sensor TM) which is an optical sensor mounted on the LANDSAT 4 satellite.
The image obtained from the sensor TM mounted on the LANDSAT 4 satellite includes attitude fluctuation factors of a high frequency (2 to 125 Hz) and may cause hunting during correction processing. Accordingly, a conventional correction processing method for a satellite image can not satisfactorily cope with such an image. The attitude fluctuation factors are caused by the vibration of a large-sized antenna of the satellite. The hunting is caused by the complicated scanning resulting from the reciprocating scanning of the mirror performed by the sensor TM. For the problem of the attitude fluctuation factors, it is conceivable to apply thereto the correction processing for the geometric distortion which has heretofore been used for the attitude fluctuation with a low frequency of 2 Hz or less. However, this method is not desirable since it brings about another problem that an enormous volume of computation is required. The problem of hunting is caused by the unconverging iteration calculation resulting from the absence of the corresponding ground point when a corrected image is to be derived from an observed (uncorrected) image. It is conceivable to obviate this problem by establishing appropriate stopping times for iteration calculation. In this case, however, a considerably large number of stopping times must be set, resulting in a different problem of an increased processing time.